Mentoring in the Metacrisis -evolving coaching and mentoring in a fracturing world

jembendell1 Comment

“If the world is falling apart, and along with it our careers, why do we need coaches and mentors? If we dropped the idea of self-improvement we could save ourselves some time, stress and money! Isn’t it time we threw coaching, mentoring, and all that ‘leadership development’ stuff, into the bin of ‘what we did when we had a future and some budgets to play with’?”

As someone who quit being a director of a University institute working in leadership development, to become a ‘doomster’ who now experiments with farming and music, you might think I reached that type of nihilistic conclusion about professional development, and even personal development. But I didn’t. Instead, my collapse-awareness opened me up to new questions and interests, with some of that being being helped by coaches and mentors, both hired and informal. I feel like I have been ‘growing’ more since my collapse awareness. Yet there is a problem: I hear from professionals in the coaching space that collapse-awareness is still a niche view, with the mainstream behaving as if there is a future of shiny happy coaches holding hands with abundant clients. So in this essay I am sharing what I think about how coaching and mentoring can evolve during the metacrisis, and how we are approaching that in the Metacrisis Initiative.

In case you didn’t know, recent decades have seen professional coaching grow from a niche practice into a substantial global industry. Organisations such as the ICF, AC, EMCC, and EASC, have helped develop standards, competencies, and ethical frameworks to provide coaching and coaches more credibility in professional settings. Relatedly, a different stream of ‘life coaching’ has flourished in the field of personal development, often influenced by concepts that emphasise the power of intention in shaping our experience of life. Both of these strands have offered something valuable. I have seen how professional coaching has helped many of my friends in senior management, from business to the United Nations, to navigate their career and leadership challenges. I also witnessed how manifestation-oriented life coaching encouraged other friends, often self-employed, to recognise the role that mindset and attention play in shaping our experience. Receiving that latter mode of coaching in 2018 and 2019, helped me to respond to the explosion of attention to my work on the climate crisis at the time. Looking back, I think it gave me more confidence to speak from my heart and to focus on the new initiatives which I regarded as important at the time (the Deep Adaptation Forum and Extinction Rebellion). 

Despite these upsides, I have always had a nagging feeling that those coaching approaches have some fundamental limitations. That nagging feeling grew as I talked with members of the psychotherapy profession on how they respond to emotions related to climate change. In 2019, I delivered a talk at a conference of counsellors and psychotherapists (the UKCP). I discovered that many therapists were receiving many clients who expressed fear and sadness about the climate situation, and were also feeling difficult emotions themselves. They explained how they did not feel it authentic to suggest to their clients that the threats could be managed and disasters averted. Since then, there has been a lot of work done in the field of climate psychology, although its penetration into wider counselling and psychotherapy is limited, and the influence of traditional concepts seems unhelpful (as discussed in a previous essay). In the related fields of professional coaching and life coaching, I have heard of some similar disquiet, and engaged in some coach-led climate-aware initiatives that exist to evolve principles and practices. However, looking at mainstream coaching and leadership development today, I do not see that much has changed.

After looking closer at mainstream coaching practices, and the critiques that others have made, I now conclude that such practices often mobilise underlying assumptions which limit their ability to fully meet the needs of the present moment. Those assumptions include the societal context of coaching, the personal purpose of coaching, and the commercial interest of providers. In this essay, I will explore the problems with such assumptions, and how coaching and mentoring must not overlook — instead, sometimes foreground — the profound social, ecological, and existential questions that are now pressing for so many of, whatever our professional situation. Drawing on insights from critical coaching, group practices, and the need for ‘critical wisdom’, I will explain why we are offering a new kind of peer mentoring within the Metacrisis Initiative. We use the term ‘metacrisis’ to refer to how many of today’s challenges and predicaments – ecological, social, economic, and cultural – are interwoven rather than separate, often with common causes, which destabilise our identities and worldviews, sometimes leading to maladaptive responses, but which also offer the potential for personal and collective transformation. Therefore, the evolving practice that I will outline below as ‘metacritical mentoring’ is designed to help participants help each other to live meaningfully and kindly in a fracturing world.

Limitations of some mainstream coaching

Around us we see that social and political tensions are rising, ecological stresses are intensifying, so that long-standing expectations of stability or progress now seem like old fantasies. That context means many of us are not simply seeking better performance, clearer goals, or more positive energy. Increasingly, we are questioning the direction of our work and lives altogether. Even our identities. For many of us, the questions becoming more pressing are not “How can I optimise my life?” but rather “What is mine to do in a troubled world?” and “How can I remain kind and curious when times are tough and the future feels uncertain?” If the context of professional coaching is assumed to be a stable society and the potential for a viable career, the extent to which such questions can be explored in a coaching context will be limited. That’s why something new is called for… 

For 11 years as a full professor in the field of leadership development, I was interested in ‘critical leadership studies’, which enhanced my recognition of how power dynamics shape what we might consider to be positive behaviours in organisations. Such analysis is also relevant to coaching, with some practitioners describing themselves as involved in ‘critical coaching’ where the social, political, and economic forces shaping both clients’ lives and the coaching industry itself are foregrounded. Here ‘critical’ means systematically unpacking how ideas, methods, and norms in coaching are produced, legitimised, and promoted within particular power dynamics — and how they often reproduce power structures. Working from that perspective, mainstream coaching can be regarded as reinforcing neoliberal assumptions that personal success depends solely on individual effort, while ignoring structural inequalities such as gender, class, or race. One implication of such insight is to  explore how these activities can enable collective empowerment rather than only self-improvement. Another implication is to give attention to how to democratise access to coaching knowledge — a topic I will return to in a moment. 

Given the rapid changes in the world, these ideas from critical coaching are increasingly relevant. At a minimum, to stay relevant in a ‘metacrisis’, professional coaching and mentoring will need to respond to the changes in societal conditions rather than assume the relatively stable contexts in which many coaching models were originally developed. Once recognising such instability and disruption, the question of why that is happening must be part of the conversation. With that in mind, the normal emphasis on a coach’s apparent values-neutrality and client-centred orientation, could come to be regarded as avoiding a complex reality. That existing emphasis can arise from an earnest principle of not bringing a coaches’ values into the client relationship. But one can argue that is not possible, and so it is better to be transparent about values and views, and how they will be part of the coaching process, while avoiding attempts to inculcate values in a client. Clearly this issue is a delicate one to navigate well, and it might be easier, economically and psychologically, for some coaches to avoid it. Since 2021, the Global Code of Ethics on coaching and mentoring recognises the importance of any professional coach staying abreast of “societal or environmental needs,” but doesn’t require more than some attention to stakeholders’ interests when they begin a client relationship. Instead, best practice could be regarded as foregrounding values and views, within the context of a professional commitment of a coach to be curious rather than evangelising about a particular view. The experiences of some in the counselling and psychotherapy professions could be relevant here, as therapists aware of our environmental predicament have been supporting each other with their own emotional wellbeing, as well as how to navigate the tricky issue of hosting related conversations with clients (e.g. see the CPA). Professional coaches who are concerned about climate change are also grappling with these issues, including professionals within the CCA and the new Sustainability Coaching Coalition. In time, these initiatives will hopefully influence the wider field of coaching and mentoring, rather than being an interest group that is relevant to a subset of practitioners.

Some people think that the less career-focused coaching practices are more likely to help us in a changing world. In some cases, perhaps. But in my experience, manifestation-oriented life coaching encourages the people being coached to shift their attention away from difficult emotional states toward more generative energies. That can be transformative for people who have felt stuck with a preponderance of difficult emotions or self-limiting beliefs. However, if we are experiencing grief about ecological loss, anxiety about social instability, dread about inevitable future difficulties, and moral confusion about our roles within systems that appear to be breaking down, any emphasis on ‘energetic tuning’ can seem delusional — at least initially. Skillfully held, in my experience, a manifestation approach can help people without denying the severity of the situation, so that positivity need not be mutually exclusive with grief or concern. However, it is not uncommon for a life coach within this paradigm to explain their belief that there is metaphysical power involved in one having a positive outlook on one’s relationship with the world, and that the evidence of that will be in both material success and experiencing more ‘positive’ emotions. An implication of such a view is either that the wider world is not important, or, it can magically improve by focusing on one’s personal energetic tuning. Yet poverty, war, and environmental damage do not disappear by ignoring them. Neither are they definitely ameliorated by us focusing on them. Nevertheless, being curious about all that is happening in the world, and wanting to be less harmful and more useful, is widely recognised as a natural state for us humans, and we can welcome that not only according to specific values, but because it provides the possibility for collective action that might be of wider benefit. 

In future, manifestation-focused life coaching could increasingly fail to provide a deeper source of emotional resilience in challenging times. That is, unless it integrates attention to and acceptance of such difficulties in the world, and how that impinges on each of us. For those coaches who are emotionally resourced to explore that approach, perhaps even accepting we live in a time of metacrisis and collapse, then there is an important and growing role to play. My view is that insights from more contemplative and mystical understandings of the human condition are essential for such an evolution of life coaching.  

We should also recognise that most of the public will never encounter coaching directly. They are navigating tough questions in an unstable world in their communities, families, workplaces, religious institutions. Some people join initiatives such as men’s groups and joint 12-step programmes, which explicitly offer forms of peer mentoring, where we both support and gain support from fellow participants rather than trained professionals. On the one hand, the professionalisation of coaching has codified approaches, improved standards, and added safeguards, in ways that made it more possible for organisations to fund their staff to access it. On the other hand, that has aided the commodification and commercialisation of the practice in ways that may have made it more expensive and thus distant from the wider public. That presents an issue which the psychotherapy profession has already acknowledged: the wellbeing of a population depends on how societies support each other before they seek professional help. Those of us interested in the contribution of coaching and mentoring to society can therefore ask: how might we open up access while enabling the quality of what is experienced? That is why methods for ‘peer mentoring’ in society come into focus. 

The paradox of process in support groups

Over the years I have experienced, and also facilitated, group processes which seek to help participants in ways that offer some of the benefits of coaching without the limitations I’ve just described. Many of the people listed in the ‘deep adaptation guidance database’ have learned how to offer something more relevant for today. Yes, even the ones who came from manifestation life coaching traditions! One modality that Katie Carr and I dubbed ‘deep relating,’ helps us break out of habituated patterns of superficial communication. But what I’ve begun to wonder is whether a simpler-yet-comprehensive model for peer mentoring in small groups would be useful. And that is the origin of a new peer mentoring programme within the Metacrisis Initiative, for which this essay is background reading.  

I mentioned earlier that peer mentoring is a developmental relationship in which individuals regard themselves as having similar status and role to support each other’s reflection, problem-solving and deeper learning — typically through semi-structured dialogue. Also dubbed ‘co-mentoring’, it is where each participant alternately receives perspective, feedback, accountability, and emotional support, as well as offering that to others when invited to do so. In my experience of such processes, I discovered a paradox. On the one hand, participants benefit from a basic structure for how to be in a circle together — virtual or real — and from a menu of process tools to call upon when someone in the group chooses that. Otherwise, groups can repeat the patterns of superficial conversation and biased representations as we experience in normal life. However, on the other hand, an attachment to rules and the use of process tools, can displace the intention of being together and hide, or smother, the humanness of each participant. What I loved about the men’s group I was part of, is that we came together to support ourselves and each other with open hearts. When it fell apart, for me and some others, was when people wanted to ‘do the work’ with process tools, with little interest in the other men, or in being fully seen. I realised that our ‘heartfulness’ is what made the group so valuable, and it is what has drawn me to the guidance of Reverend Wright on ways to cultivate that. 

This experience also brought me to an awareness that is not just ‘critical’ of attachment to specific processes and methods, but ‘metacritical’, where all models and explanations, as well as critiques of them, can be unpacked for what they do or don’t help us to see, be, and do, rather than some being ultimate truths. This reflects a deeper understanding of the ‘criticality’ I mentioned above, which recognises that any of our concepts and models are ‘social constructions’ which can point in the direction of truth but not precisely represent such truth. As Lao Tsu wrote, millenia ago, “the truth that can be told, is not the eternal truth.” That is really important to keep in mind when considering participating in coaching or mentoring during these times, where existential questions about the nature and meaning of life are naturally arising. Unless we are metacritical in our view, we might open the door to a procession of religious leaders and alternative spiritual gurus, each asking us to uncritically accept their stories of everything seen and unseen. 

In my book Breaking Together, I explained that when our assumptions about life, society, and the future are fractured, we can feel bewildered and become vulnerable to manipulation, whether from authorities or opportunists. Therefore, I argued how important it is to cultivate our ability to continually investigate the nature of truth, without craving for emotional security or escape. I termed that ‘critical wisdom’, which involves four capabilities. Logical reasoning remains incredibly important to test any ideas we are told and reduce the various biases that are mobilised in public communication today. The ability to recognise assumptions and views embedded in the terms and symbols we experience in society, and how they enact and enforce power relations, is also essential (something termed ‘critical literacy’). Mindfulness, where we can better witness our thoughts and associated emotions, rather than be defined and driven by them, remains key to avoiding delusion. Such mindfulness can also enable our ability to allow our unconscious mind to rise into our consciousness and be assessed, which is another way of thinking about our ‘intuition’. Perhaps what we call ‘intuition,’ is also our capacity to listen to what might be communicated by the aspect of our consciousness that is connected to the universal and eternal nature of reality. The loving quality of that communication is why Reverend Wright describes it as ‘heartfulness’, and his guidance on cultivating that quality in us has been influencing my development of practices for peer mentoring.  

Metacritical Mentoring

The ideas I have explained thus far have led me to experiment with a different approach with the people who joined the Metacrisis Initiative. By naming this ‘Metacritical Mentoring’, I am pointing to the need for ‘critical wisdom’ in a metacrisis, including our constructive and open-ended questioning of concepts, methods and contexts, as we centre our aims of connection, curiosity and kindness. We are trialling the approach in small online groups composed of people who aim to live and act well within the metacrisis — to be ‘heartful’ in our responses to these times. We will draw practices from peer-to-peer coaching, co-mentoring, dialogue practices, and community learning, while avoiding some of the assumptions embedded in existing traditions, and to give space to the existential questions that arise from a recognition of metacrisis and collapse. 

Six working principles will guide the approach of Metacritical Mentoring:

First, we do not focus merely on individual self-actualisation and success, but invite each other to experience ourselves as curious and kind participants in processes of collective liberation and reconnection. 

Second, we do not assume stable and progressing contexts, but recognise that many of us think that we are living through volatile and uncertain conditions, and therefore we seek to support reflection and adaptation within that reality.

Third, we do not frame difficult emotions as obstacles to vitality. Instead, grief, fear, anger, dread, and confusion are welcomed as understandable responses to what we perceive around us, and can be sources of insight and solidarity if we help each other towards that.

Fourth, we do not restrict ourselves to specific frameworks of co-mentoring. Instead, we use them as tools which we can benefit from, while also benefitting from critiques of such tools, as part of cultivating our ‘critical wisdom’ and our foregrounding of ‘heartfulness’ in our interactions.

Fifth, we do not assume any mentor’s or facilitator’s neutrality, but recognise the assumptions, beliefs, and values, of all co-mentoring participants, are involved in the process and can be usefully explored without craving correctness or avoiding shame. 

Finally, we do not treat the capacity to support others as a scarce professional skill, but share practices and facilitation approaches so that participants can support one another and seed similar activities elsewhere. Therefore, we will continue to ask ourselves how we might bring what we benefit to others with less privilege or opportunity.

These ideas are still evolving, and the groups themselves are modest experiments rather than a finished methodology. By attempting to meet the need for forms of accompaniment on how to live meaningfully in a metacrisis, we will learn something useful as we go. 

For those of you involved in coaching and mentoring, this may be an interesting moment to ask: what kinds of conversations does our time now require, and how might our practices evolve to hold them? For more and more people? 

You are also welcome to join the Metacrisis Initiative. If you are a young professional from the Majority World, you can apply to join for free. 

❤ Jem

Reflection Exercise:

Remember a time when you received support from someone (or group) that changed your life for the better over the mid-to-long term. It might have been one conversation, or a series of conversations, or a tangible action rather than conversation. Recall the situation you were in, materially and emotionally, what the person(s) did, what was it about you and/or their input which helped it reach you, and how you changed as a result. Write down all of these aspects. Then write one sentence which summarises what it was about the person(s) and the interaction that helped you. 

PS: If you would like a definition…

The practice of peer mentoring in the metacrisis might not need a new term to describe it, especially if it doesn’t grow beyond our initial pilot this year. But just in case… 

Metacritical Mentoring is the name given to a peer mentoring approach, where non-experts both receive and offer support, to help them live more consciously and positively during the metacrisis of environmental, societal and personal circumstances. The approach deploys a deeper understanding of ‘critical thinking’ as involving the consideration of the benefits and limitations of any concepts, how they shape our attention, how they are produced by and re-produce power dynamics, while also reflexively considering how those insights also apply to any critiques. Six initial principles, published in March 2026, provide an initial philosophy, which attempt to differentiate the practice from popular forms of coaching and mentoring at the time.

In memory of Martin Caine: who brought into men’s groups his heart, humility, presence, warmth, and joy of being in the company of others, whom he saw as chosen brothers.

My thanks to Josie McLean for comments on an earlier version of this essay. As a member of the Metacrisis Initiative you can share thoughts on this essay and related ideas with us and others.

PREVIOUS WRITINGS ON PROFESSIONAL IMPLICATIONS OF COLLAPSE AWARENESS

Keeping your job at the end of the world (as we know it)

The Professional Implications of Collapse: Deep Adaptation in Organizations

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If a member, then you can see the meetings and decide if you want to join either the salons, the peer mentoring, or both. As a member you can also discuss the issues in this essay in the community chat.

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Why Regenerativity Matters to a Changing Climate, and Beyond

jembendell

Visiting the Green School in Bali in 2018 was a revelation for me. I met students who were bravely facing the troubling science on how badly we modern humans have damaged the biosphere and climate. I explained the bad news about what that probably means for the future of our societies, and witnessed them discussing how they might integrate that into their future plans. I was so impressed with the way they engaged the topic, I made a film about them! Seven years on, I went back to the school, to share some lessons from my regenerative farm and training centre in Bali. I discovered the Green School staff have evolved their understanding of ‘green’ to embrace “regenerativity’ as their mission. Discussing with parents, I realised that this aspiration to pursue ‘regenerativity’ could give new impetus for action on our changing climate, including both attempts to reduce its pace and negative impacts, as well as reshape how we live well in an era of disruption and collapse. However, I also heard one teacher who seemed to use the term more as a nod to environmental care without admitting the pain of failure that is now associated with the concept of ‘sustainability’. Coming away from the School, I took time to consider what the concept of regeneration might add to a realistic agenda on the metacrisis of economic, social, ecological and political disruption that is unfolding around us. That got me asking the question: who or what can I nurture due to my love of Life? After decades of working on sustainability, from the highest levels of the UN to the grassroots of a farm, this felt like a moment for evolving my focus, and so I’ve written this essay to share about it. 

In the following lines, I am going to explore the potential and the pitfalls of the regenerative agenda as a response to our unfolding metacrisis. On climate, it is important to recognise that regenerating key living systems is not just an adjunct to emissions reduction but should be a core part of our climate response. It is also important to see that for the concept of regeneration to be meaningful beyond our climate predicament, we must acknowledge the profound failures — scientific, economic, political, and cultural — that have led us to this point. After discussing those, I will share some thoughts on how the term ‘regenerativity’ might be used authentically to convene genuine action, or misused to obscure the same failed ideas. I’ll explain how I’ve concluded the concept can offer a deeply personal and practical signpost for living with love and purpose in an era of metacrisis and collapse. It’s why I’ll conclude this essay by proposing ‘regeneration’ as a 6th R within the Deep Adaptation framework. 

Panecological climatology

For decades, climate action has been a story of subtraction. The central metric has been carbon and our primary goal has been emissions reduction. This narrow calculus, while critical, is proving insufficient. Not only are most economies remaining carbon heavy, the agenda has been framed as limiting damage from one factor, carbon emissions. Instead, both recent climate observations, and growing bodies of research, point to the role of large forests and healthy oceans in modulating the world’s climate through seeding clouds which reflect the sun’s rays. If that is new to you, please check my essay on the topic, or the work of Dr Anna Makarieva. The findings of such research tell us that attempts to regenerate the planet’s living systems from a degraded state should be more central to climate action in future. The principle, capability and agenda known as ‘regenerativity’ could encapsulate that planetary imperative, if it is conceptualised honestly, and in light of the failures of our past attempts at sustainability. Moreover, efforts to regenerate both degraded ecosystems and human cultures offer pathways for attempting to adapt to inevitable disruptions from our changing climate – the situation many now term the ‘metacrisis’. 

The conventional carbon-centric view is missing the forest for the trees, quite literally. It treats the climate as a simple atmospheric chemistry problem. Yet, as emerging ‘panecological’ analysis emphasises, Earth’s thermostat is affected by humans not just by our greenhouse gas emissions, but by our impacts on the dynamics of major ecosystems — particularly vast forests and healthy oceans. These are not passive carbon sinks but active climate modulators. The great boreal and tropical forests, for instance, do more than store carbon. Through the release of bacteria and pollen, they seed clouds that directly cool their regions, and beyond, by reflecting solar radiation. There is evidence that the condensation processes also draw in air from the oceans, creating a ‘biotic pump’ that affects the Earth’s energy balance. Similarly, a thriving ocean teeming with the right kinds of phytoplankton doesn’t merely absorb CO₂ as it is the source of over half the world’s cloud-condensation nuclei, via the production of dimethyl sulfide. The functioning of these systems directly shapes planetary albedo, or reflectivity, and thus temperatures around the world.  

A regenerative agenda could respond to this profound interdependence. That is because it brings our attention to restoring, renewing, and revitalising our environmental, social, and cultural systems. Environmentally, the focus is on healing ecosystems. That involves soil health, habitats, biodiversity, and cleaning up toxics and plastics. But it could also involve restoring the innate cooling capacity of the planet. This means regenerating forests for their cloud-seeding and biotic pump, not just their timber or carbon credits. It means restoring marine health for climate regulation, not just fish stocks. The goal can be to enable these systems to return to their climate-modulating potential once again. 

Critically, this regenerative lens could transform how we think about regulations, investments, and subsidies in response to a climate emergency. Because the most potent climate technology available is Life itself. Therefore, funding large-scale ecosystem restoration — from mangrove swamps to peatlands to seabed grasslands — becomes an investment in natural climate engineering. Of course it also buys the potential for enhanced biodiversity, water security, and community resilience, alongside the beautiful intrinsic value of wild habitats. In comparison, those focusing on expensive and energy-hungry machines to capture carbon from air, or trialling means of atmospheric blocking of the sun, can be seen as misunderstanding the complexity of climate within the homeostatic processes of a living planet. 

In addition to the wider climate cooling potential of repairing ecosystems, large forests can also help to moderate some of the local effects of more variable and extreme weather. Therefore, environmental regeneration can be seen as part of the process of adapting to climate change. For instance, rather than just erecting higher seawalls, a regenerative strategy could revive coastal mangrove ecosystems that attenuate storm surges, nurture fisheries, and sequester carbon. For farmers confronting aridification, it means regenerating the soil’s sponge-like capacity through agroecology, reducing irrigation needs while protecting yields. For cities, it could mean creating more water-retentive green spaces to help manage floods. 

Of course the climate adaptation of human societies is as much about culture, politics and economics than it is about ecosystems. By including these aspects of our lived experience, the concept of ‘regenerativity’ may help promote a more holistic understanding of climate chaos and what to do about it. For instance, socially and culturally, we could seek to promote forms of organisation and community that promote well-being and creativity, without relying on further consumption or economic growth. I say ‘could’, because to attempt that authentically, and at scale, we must not sideline politics and economics from our analysis and agenda. 

Transformative failures

One thing I appreciate about the term ‘regenerativity’ is the implicit acceptance of failure. Otherwise, would we only have stuff to generate, not re-generate? If our environment, society and culture weren’t so badly degraded, would we not be talking about greater expansion, improvement, conservation, persistence, or sustainability? So when using the term regeneration authentically, rather than tactically or superficially, we need to acknowledge what it is that has failed, degraded and died, and what we are learning from that. 

I think the concept of regeneration can point us to scientific, economic, political and cultural or spiritual failures, which have culminated in the unfolding ecological failure. Scientifically, those of us modern humans who care about each other and wider Life, have failed to comprehensively understand the complex interactions of living systems in ways that might inform transformative activism and policy agendas. Economically, we have failed to accept that an expansionist monetary system and portfolio-maximising investment strategies have combined to blast through ecological limits, engineer unnecessary wants, and distort public understanding of what is good and true. Politically, we have failed to generate national and international political movements and policy agendas that are sufficiently free from domestic corruption and transnational capitalist control to put people and planet first and foremost. Culturally and spiritually, we modern humans, on average, have failed to experience our interbeing with the environment sufficiently to protect it from harm, and therefore ourselves. 

Together these failures can be observed in the poverty of the modern environmental movement and professions themselves. Professionalisation of environmental concern transformed effort into a technocratic project with neither honesty nor soul. Most of us ended up being campaigners for, or officers of, one faction of global capital involved in lower-carbon energy, promoting the ‘fake green fairytale’ of a managed transition to an electric wonderland where we don’t have to give up anything (something I explained on ABC radio in Australia). Instead, any meaningful use of the concept of ‘regeneration’ or  ‘regenerativity’ must involve accepting our personal and collective wounds, the need for healing and regrowing. It means that we, and our organisations, are involved in nurturing Life, in its various forms. 

For decades I worked with some peak institutions in the world on the topics of Sustainable Development and Corporate Sustainability, such as the United Nations, World Economic Forum and large NGOs. I’ve heard former colleagues sound personally disheartened and dismayed by failure, while maintaining a public charade of positivity about their work. They have been wanting to find a way of incorporating the tragic decline and disruption, while maintaining their professional status, income, and sense of purpose. As a result, some are moving into the idea that adaptation to climate change is the new agenda to lead on. Others are adopting ‘regeneration’ as their label. They say versions of: “sustainability was about being less bad, but in this situation of great loss, we need managers, leaders and entrepreneurs committed to regeneration”. That represents an attempt to recognise failure while avoiding looking at how one has been bystanding that failure, or even helped it to occur through one’s own career choices and the role of one’s profession.   

I don’t blame them. We tend to crave upbeat stories. Even about death, with all the consequences for society that produces. But what such misleading framing of ‘regeneration’ could mean is that many people miss the opportunity for a deeper reckoning, learning, and transformation in their own lives. One of those learnings is that a cause of past failure has been the financial and societal incentives for people in business, government and civil society to express delusional and toxic optimism rather than explain truths which threaten our support for incumbent power. Unfortunately, the sloppy and opportunistic use of regenerativity discourse by consultants and NGOs could mislead people about where to find really authentic and committed folks, who are incorporating a recognition of systemic failure in their desire to nurture Life. More broadly, the chance for a general public awakening on ecological breakdown to then generate transformative agendas, which naturally challenge or move beyond capitalism and imperialism, could be sunk under the deluge of people claiming they are about ‘regenerativity’. 

The power of a term is how it convenes

I’m not claiming there is only one true definition of regeneration and regenerativity. Like any concept, it is a social construction, and we would waste a huge amount of time and energy to chase the impossibility of an uncontested correct definition. Even if we adopt the concept in a devout way,  we must admit we don’t actually know if there is much ecological regeneration-by-humans possible at scale in the context of a destabilising climate. We humans fall into the trap of reification – because there is a word for something, and a history about that word, we think there is a tangible something it corresponds to, rather than pointing at an arbitrary grouping of diverse contextual unfolding effemeral phenomena. That goes for most concepts. Buddhists (and critical discourse theorists) say for all concepts. This realisation doesn’t mean we give up on trying to be clear about what we mean, and why, when we use terms; it means we think critically about what ideas, framings and narratives enable or hamper different parts of society and ways of being. It means we recognise the value of a concept that helps people with similar concerns and intentions to find each other. It means we assess our own use of the term, to make sure we aren’t repackaging our old efforts, or overselling small projects to help the powerful tell a palliative fairytale for all. This approach to concepts is part of the ‘critical wisdom’ we must cultivate in ourselves and society if we are to lessen the harms of living in a metacrisis (as explained in Chapter 8 of my book). 

An academic study reported in 2024 that “notions of regeneration have entered discourses in several fields that are relevant for sustainability, including, among others, ecology, agriculture, economics, management, sociology, psychology and chemistry.” Amongst those fields, agriculture and economics seems most vibrant. Regenerative agriculture, as we understand it at Bekandze Farm, is a land-management practice that actively seeks to improve soils, increase biodiversity, and maintain water cycles, so that the farming can restore the ecosystem of the land rather than depleting it. Similarly, regenerative economics is a framework that views the economy not as a machine to be optimized, but as a living system embedded within the natural world. The idea is there can be economic activities which restore, heal and build the health of social and ecological systems. The concept has been developed by Daniel Christian Wahl and others to apply to whole cultures. That means we design or defend human societies that actively restore, heal and enhance the health and vitality of social and ecological systems. 

With all that in mind, we could ask ourselves more complicated questions than what a regenerative farm, such as my own, could look like. Will there be a regenerative automobile?  A regenerative global financial institution? A regenerative medical profession? If regeneration involves the nurturing of Life, then the bar is set quite high. Could an automobile, whether hybrid or electric, ever be truly regenerating nature and society? It is unlikely — especially if you consider the full life cycle. Instead, projects to help people live closer to work, and use public transport to get there, would be far more Life-nurturing, in various ways. Put that way, I can see an honest use of the term not appealing to corporate executives and consultants and business school academics, who prefer buzz terms to promote themselves to prospective clients and students. It is one reason why I am pleased to have quit my professorship and now work freelance in support of those who aren’t afraid to ask the tough questions of themselves, organisations and society (the Metacrisis Meetings Initiative). 

Having this awareness that any term is as valuable as what it does or doesn’t enable, means that we can also look at the potential shadows of the term regeneration, or regenerativity.  One shadow could be the subtle reassertion of ‘anthropocentrism’ or human-supremacy, where we imagine that humanity must fix wider nature, rather than rediscover a way to live in harmony and partnership with our environment, much like a ‘keystone species’ (something I explore in the latter half of my book Breaking Together). Another shadow could be the exclusive nature of the conversation it invites us into: as only those who aren’t just trying to cope with difficulties are able to discuss how to align their lives with regenerativity. Recognising possible shadows does not negate a concept, or mean everyone who uses the concept is ignoring the shadow: instead, that recognition helps us to address potential limitations, if we wish. 

Deep Adaptation, regeneration and me

For those of you who have followed my work on societal disruption and collapse, might be wondering how an embrace of the concept of regeneration might fit with the existing framework of Deep Adaptation (DA). If you don’t know about that concept, suffice to say it means seeking to adapt personally and collectively to the societal disruption and collapse that arise, directly or indirectly, from climate change and ecological damage . Deep Adaptation was the title of a paper I wrote which went viral, with over a million downloads. Over the years I have noticed many people inspired by their anticipation, acceptance or experience of societal collapse, have been moved to work on nurturing life in particular or in general. They aren’t attached to outcome, but become re-connected with what they most value and cherish, which includes the living world, loved ones, and the processes of creation. In addition, I have been aware that the existing DA framework of 5Rs does not invite much attention to our environment. Therefore, I think it would be useful to support more discussion of what and whom we are nurturing within the context of metacrisis and collapse. Therefore, I am proposing ‘regeneration’ as the sixth R in the DA framework for reflection and conversation. The question we can ask ourselves is: What or whom can we nurture due to our love of Life? Putting it more simply, we can ask: how am I nurturing Life? 

Asking myself that question, I realised that some of my choices in the years since I became collapse aware have been aligned with this Life-nurturing sentiment. At the simplest level, I started rescuing kittens! Initially they were for other people to adopt, as I had bad allergies. But finally, I gave in and rescued one for myself from the Buddhist temple in the north of the island — and overcame my allergies. Then I rescued his likely nephew from the same temple 2 years later. I found them in distress, as I was co-hosting meditation and kirtan retreats at that temple. I have now co-hosted 17, as my small way to enable, in myself and the other participants, both inner calm and outer curiosity, in an interfaith setting. That is also why I play in bands that host kirtans and cacao ceremonies, and am now a dance leader in training, with the Sufi-founded Dances of Universal Peace. It is also why I produced Oracle Cards to help people return to gratitude, wonder and agency in the face of the metacrisis. 

These personal activities may seem less obviously regenerative than the organic farm and farm school I founded, but they have been more central to my sense and expression of love and care. I hope we can find a new business partner or donor who shares similar perspectives and intentions, so we can build the facilities to open a small residential school. I won’t feel attached to that outcome, or sacrifice to get there, as I know that a shift towards a more nurturing intention will express itself in many ways, depending how life unfolds. In that process, I recognise how important it will be to have fellow travellers. It’s why I welcomed the personal focus of questions put to me by podcasters by Carlotta and Catie, and why I will be joining one of the peer mentoring groups of the Metacrisis Initiative (…with the deadline for first cohort of the peer mentoring coming soon).    

Back to climate chaos, and beyond

Our predicament of a rapidly destabilising climate, and overshoot of the capacity of the Earth to sustain humanity, cannot be responded to by subtraction alone. We must couple urgent emissions reductions with a bold, additive strategy of ecological renewal. A panecological understanding of life on Earth points to how a relatively stable climate was a product of a healthy biosphere. By embracing regenerativity as the principle of shaping ways of living that generate more life, health, and potential than they consume, I hope we broaden our field of vision and action on the environmental tragedy that has been unfolding around us. Human survival may depend on recognising that the best way to stabilise our atmosphere is to re-animate our Earth, rather than submit it further to machines. 

Ultimately, regeneration is not a new metric to be achieved, nor a project to save humanity so it can persist a little longer on Earth. Instead, it can be part of the conversation as we reorient our very being — a shift from asking “how long can we last?” to “how fully can we live?” As a new question within the Deep Adaptation framework, it invites us to regard our ‘success’ not in years of survival, but in the depth of our connection to the living world, the creativity we unleash in service of life, and the love we cultivate in the face of loss. It means some of us embracing our role as a ‘keystone species’, not by controlling the planet, but by participating in its healing, and in doing so, healing ourselves. Regeneration, therefore, can invite a conversation about the quality of our existence on this earth, not merely its duration. 

I hope Green School and other educational centres that adopt concepts like regeneration can do so while avoiding any rebranding of failed organisational dynamics and social change strategies, or accidentally sidestepping the lessons from decades of effort on sustainability and social justice. Instead, educational institutions can approach the concept of regeneration with ‘critical wisdom’ to help their students and staff explore a meaningful way of living through metacrisis, disruption, and even societal collapse. It looks like with Regeneration27 and related initiatives, many at the school are taking this matter seriously — I’m hoping to see some ripples.

Thx, Jemx

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If you have the financial means to help us develop Bekandze Farm School into a destination with accommodation, please get in touch via www.bekandze.net or info@bekandze.net  ….If with lesser means, but a wish to help promote organic farming in Indonesia, please consider our crowdfund.  If you are in Bali in May or August 2026, please consider our weekend retreats at the temple.

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Make Patriotism Great Again: some ideas from a British guy abroad

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I have a strange habit when I am bored. It involves Ricky Gervais. Or rather, some video clips of him on stage. I must have watched him hosting the Golden Globe Awards a dozen times. The film stars are in their tuxedos and gowns, knowing the camera is panning across their faces. Ricky expresses shock at being invited to host again, then takes a sip of beer at the lectern, and tells his audience they shouldn’t try to lecture us on anything, as “most of you have spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg”. He then cracks a joke about Jeffrey Epstein, and as the groan spreads, tells them: “Shut up. I know he was your friend.” The camera cuts to shocked faces in the audience – rather prophetic editing, in retrospect.  

When I watch it, I don’t just smirk. I don’t just recognise it as familiar. I also feel an involuntary pride. That mockery of pomp, deflation of status, and saying what’s uncomfortable. It is a comedy directed at the powerful, and I instinctively place that as something I call “British.” Which is a bit odd, if I think about it. Because it isn’t the pride of seeing a sibling succeed, or a friend flourish at something I helped them work on. The pride arises from my imagined common identity with the kind of attitude and behaviour Gervais is engaged in. It is a story about an “us” that I feel is being embodied by him. But the emotion arrives without analysis: a flash of identification with a national characteristic I like. I know other Brits don’t feel the same way and share an identity around completely different characteristics. And that’s what’s so malleable about our common identities and, therefore, national pride. This got me thinking about ‘patriotism’ today, as someone who emigrated from the UK and now looks back at the country during an era of economic decline, ‘metacrisis’, and even systemic breakdown, which I outlined in the book Breaking Together.

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Transcending stories about spirit and matter to act from our wonder about both

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“If the flesh came into being because of the spirit, it is a wonder. If the spirit came into being because of the body, it is a wonder of wonders. But I, I am amazed at how this great wealth has come to dwell in this poverty.” Saying 29 of Jesus, in The Gospel of Thomas. 

Have we modern humans poisoned and degraded our living home and brought society to collapse due to our delusion that we are separate from nature and that nature is separate from the divine? That is a view I’ve had a lot of time for. It was part of my motivation for exploring different religious ideas, as well as taking a revisionist perspective on the religion of my upbringing — Christianity. That led me to look at some of the Gnostic Gospels, over the past year. What I learned has shifted my perspective on the deeper causes of our overly destructive habits as modern humans. In this essay I’ll share my realisations through a focus on one specific saying of Jesus, according to a text called the Gospel of Thomas, which was unknown in the modern world before the 1970s. 

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What is the Courageous Response to Climate Chaos? Not eco-authoritarianism.

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Are you hearing more people talk about needing to do “whatever it takes to save the planet”? Have you heard people blame democracy as the reason for our intractable problems, including persistent poverty, extreme inequality, and the unaffordable cost of living, or environmental damage and breakdown? I have been hearing variations of that perspective, particularly from people rightly dreading the impacts of climate chaos. Over three decades of work on the topic, I witnessed authoritarian musings of frustrated environmentalists being expressed in private. But now I hear them articulated in public. One person who has brought this topic into the open is the environmental academic John Foster. Writing at the Greenhouse Think Tank, he argues: “the intelligent and informed who do recognise the urgency of transformation must organise themselves for a vanguard seizure of power…” He has a new book out this year, which reminded me I hadn’t responded to his critique of my arguments against such eco-authoritarianism. As John’s Lifeworld book will go deeper into his philosophical justification for authoritarian rule by an ecologically-minded elite, I think it is a good time to rejoin the conversation. If you are interested in the future of politics in a metacrisis, where societies experience environmental breakdown, then I hope this long-form essay will provide some stimuli for your own political opinions and campaigning. 

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Reflections on the Epstein Scandal and the Wealth Supremacy Culture

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In 2012 I had some interaction with Jeffrey Epstein, only remotely by skype, calls and emails, and where we reached no agreement. I mentioned this experience with the deceased and now-infamous criminal billionaire in my 2023 book, and in a 2024 article on the topic (here). The matter of his life (including crimes, accomplices, purposes and death) is highly charged, especially for survivors of sexual abuse and child abuse. The survivors of abuse, by him and his accomplices, as well as independent media, are doing immense work to obtain greater transparency, in the pursuit of truth, accountability, and justice. Because of the bizarre online interaction I had with Epstein, I followed that struggle, as well as the slow release of information about the case. This culminated last week with me finally appearing in the Epstein files, specifically my email correspondence about his interest in alternative currencies. A few people have asked me about it, so I thought it helpful to share what I think I know of what’s most important about this ‘story’ (based on what I have gleaned from the public information). As it would take a long time, I will not elaborate with examples or put in links to sources – so if you are intrigued or doubtful, please use search and/or AI to identify further information about what I mention here. I know some people prefer to dismiss it all as conspiracy-laden speculation, but the evidence is now sufficient to point not just to sex crime, but to both a sinister agenda and network, and to a ‘wealth supremacy culture’ that affects everyone’s lives and the direction of humanity.

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Don’t Forget the Dread – Deeper Healing in the Metacrisis

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I invited the co-admin of the largest Deep Adaptation group in the world to share her ideas on the difficult emotions experienced by people who awaken to metacrisis and collapse. In this essay Krisztina Csapo explains it is unhelpful to frame such emotions as a form of general anxiety. Instead, more can be gained from recognising and responding to them as dread, grief, trauma and moral injury. I have left comments open for you to share relevant resources and initiatives at the end. Thx, Jem (Image by Ellis Rosen).

How do we psychologically sustain ourselves in times like these? This question arises again and again within communities working on ecological and social harm, and especially on the prospect of societal collapse. Through six years of engagement with the international Deep Adaptation movement, including facilitating the largest such national group, I have become much clearer about what helps — and what does not. That clarity begins with taking seriously the emotional reality people are living with as they confront the full gravity of our predicament.

I have come to see that framing what people — especially young people — are feeling as “climate anxiety” is often a misdiagnosis. It is misleading because it suggests a variant of generalized anxiety, thereby pathologizing responses that are understandable and proportionate to the situation. And it is unhelpful because well-known anxiety-management strategies frequently fail to address the deeper distress involved, sometimes adding shame or a sense of inadequacy when the “anxiety” does not go away.

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